In the Appendix to my 1947 edition of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, T. S. Eliot discusses the purpose and ultimate failure of The Criterion before a post-war German audience. It may be odd to start the first editorial note of this year with a reflection on the demise of an old journal, however there are some striking parallels with the spirit of the times, then and now, worthy of comparison.
The diagnosis Eliot offers for the eclipse of the review he edited between 1922 and 1939 is fundamentally based on cultural considerations: The Criterion's inability to stimulate the “thought and sensibility” between men of letters living in different literary traditions across and beyond the continent was caused, ultimately, by the increasing politicisation of public life. This resulted in “the gradual closing of the mental frontiers of Europe.” The rest, as is often said, is history.
Reflecting on that history, Eliot explained that while politics and culture are intertwined, confusing one for the other can have disastrous consequences: either the desire to annihilate all but one's own, or the drive to annihilate all culture, including one's own, by replacing it with some universal construct. Such an abstract simulacra would of course be, by definition, artificial and therefore lifeless. Both errors lead to the same wasteland of spiritual impoverishment and dehumanisation. Eliot’s warnings were prescient, which is why his work will be featured for review in each issue of O&R this year, starting with After Strange Gods in these pages, with Notes to follow in the next issue, and The Idea of a Christian Society for the last one in December, 2024.
Why this special interest in Eliot? Because contemporary political elites have continued to close their mental frontiers, while thinking it is a liberal or progressive virtue to do so. It is now virtually the state cult to define culture in trivial, universalised and purely economic terms. Culture is thus treated as if it were a machine subject to rational and technocratic laws. In stark contrast, Eliot writes:
[C]ulture is something that must grow; you cannot build a tree, you can only plant it, and care for it, and wait for it to mature in its due time; and when it is grown you must not complain if you find that from an acorn has come an oak, and not a elm-tree.
Yet much of what we hear from the so-called ‘culture industry’ is in fact precisely this sort of complaint. The vanquished nativist chauvinism whose corpse was buried under the rubble of Europe at the time Eliot wrote the above words, has now been replaced by a chauvinism of a different, yet no less toxic kind: one inverted upon its own patrimony. Contrary to what we are told with increasing frequency and greater insistence with each passing year, that is certainly not what the ANZACs ‘fought for.’ Something essential has been lost in our civilisation, something that can only be described vaguely as the careful and persistent destruction of an aggregate sense of self. Certain mental frontiers have become pathologised, even criminalised in some jurisdictions, leaving only the cowardly, the incompetent or the unhelpful to advocate public dissent. The O&R will attempt to correct this defect, fill the gap and break the silence.
This issue will contain a number of contributions that address the so-called ‘national question’ from a cultural perspective, and engage in the critique of policy. Readers will also benefit from the selection of books reviewed and briefly noted, which aim to complement the essays that follow. There can be no effective consideration of policy divorced from Eliot’s view that “A national political structure affects its culture, and in turn is affected by the culture.” This metapolitical disposition should always take priority over other mundane considerations.
O&R is a print only publication for a reason: its ‘demanding’ mode of accessibility requires that our readers be more than just nominally committed to our cause. We hope that this will cultivate an intellectual worldview for an emerging, future cultural and political elite.
Since we are still writing about it and the voluminous work of its editor, perhaps Eliot’s old review wasn't such a failure after all. Indeed, this is perhaps the best success that any periodical could ever hope to achieve; its achievement is the kind we can only dream of aspiring to ourselves.
The Editor
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